Country’s top cop no longer walks his beat

The Commissioner of the RCMP Giuliano Zaccardelli tendered his resignation today, less than 24 hours after he was effectively left out on the line by the Prime Minister and the Conservative government. The Commish, finally seemed to become aware that his performance yesterday at a Parliamentary committee while perhaps not his finest hour, ended up definitely being his final hour.

Zaccardelli basically turned into a bit of an Inspector Clousseau yesterday, as he reversed his field, changing his testimony from that made in September to the very same committee. His appearance yesterday compounded on the confusion of his speaking engagement on Monday at the Canadian Club. A public session where he admitted he really didn’t have a clue about the information that the RCMP had erroneously provided to the Americans, that Maher Arar was an Islamic extremist with ties to al-Qaida.

It was that false information that led to Arar’s forced trip to Syria by way of America and a year of torture at the hands of Syrian agents. It marks one of the great mis-carriages of justice in Canadian history, and one that threatens to once again tarnish the image of Canada’s national police agency.

Zaccardelli was pretty well done as soon as he walked out the door at that committee meeting, as Don Martin in the National Post pointed out yesterday with this vivid image, “When the Prime Minister unleashes his lapdogs to join a parliamentary pack attack, someone is about to die.” Yes, well perhaps it was time to pack up the office and take that retirement after all one suspects.

With Zaccardelli’s head now delivered, the opposition smells a bit of blood in the water and we can expect the heat to be turned up on the Conservatives on this entire mess. Stockwell Day may be the next one up on the line, as the Liberals, NDP and Bloc MP’s begin to ask some hard questions about what the Public Safety Director may have known about the issue and whether it should not have been handled more expeditiously.

Day appears in front of the Parliamentary Committee on Thursday, he can expect a rather vigorous examination of his department and his knowledge of what exactly goes on within it. For his sake, he had best be a little better prepared and informed, than his former Commissioner seemed to be!

Of course, the actual transfer of Arar to Syrian custody took place under the watch of the Liberals, so one would think they might be able to refresh our memories on the whole situation at the time and how such a mess could not only be allowed to happen but to have festered for such a long period of time.

While Zaccardelli offered up a personal apology to Arar over the treatment he received at the hands of his nation’s police department, there has yet to be any official admission of responsibility by the federal government, which apparently is waiting for a settlement of financial considerations to be finalized.

While that long road to apology and compensation for Arar is probably nearing its conclusion, the nightmare for the Government is probably only just beginning.

They may not have been on watch when the mess was created, but the Conservatives have not done a particularly impressive job of cleaning it up yet. While they can point their fingers across the House at the Liberals, they are the Government now, and it’s time that they start acting like one and take the concrete steps required to make sure that these things don’t happen again.

A good start would be finding a new Commissioner that is willing to shake some of the internal trees and find out who isn’t up to the job anymore. Commissioner Zaccardelli may be taking the fall for this crisis in confidence, but surely he's not to be a solitary figure when it comes to taking responsibility for a very serious abuse of authority. The government needs to take a serious look at the chain of command and it's various branches in the national police force.

Confidence in the Mounties and their place in Canadian history, is something that Canadians take pride in. The RCMP gets cut a lot of slack from the public who realize the jobs we task them with are hard and they frequently are dealing with many of our fellow citizens who don't have our best interests at heart.

However, with the revelations of late, one has to wonder if that trust hasn’t been damaged to dangerous level and if the much respected institution has the desire to try to rebuild not only their image, but our trust in their abilities.